Maven Scope: Provided - What It Means and When to Use It

In Maven's dependency scope, 'provided' signifies that a dependency is available for use during compilation and testing phases but is excluded from the final packaged artifact. Essentially, 'provided' dependencies are meant for development and testing purposes and won't be deployed to production environments. This scope is commonly employed for dependencies reliant on libraries or frameworks offered by application servers or other containers. Since these libraries or frameworks are usually present within the container at deployment time, they don't need to be bundled with the application itself.